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Tuesday, April 06, 2010

The General Election

Today, we are told, Gordon Brown goes to the Queen and the complicated constitutional process of preparing the country for a General Election is set in motion. I believe that means the Queen dissolves parliament and sends everybody back to their constituencies to catch up on what they have to pretend to care about for the next month.

The radio stations were full of it this morning. At least, the ones I listen to were full of it. I'm not a fan of that local Northampton station which tries to fit snippets of news in between the 95th airing of Cheryl Cole's latest three minutes of derivative drivel, and some delightful piece of nostalgia from the Eighties.

Most commentators are still talking about the possibility of a hung parliament after our votes have been cast and counted. The polls indicate it, apparently, because they continue to be close. But anything can happen in those four intense weeks between Gordon having tea and biscuits with Her Majesty, and the closing of the town halls and school assembly rooms on Election Day. And the Conservative Party has the majority of the British press behind it. One more ridiculous story in the Sun about Brown snubbing a returning Afghan war hero and whole swathes of a highly impressionable and instinctively right wing British public will be calling to have him burned at the stake.

This is my prediction, as much as it grieves me to make it: Labour will lose this Election, dear reader; maybe not by much, possibly by a crushing majority; but they will lose. And the Lib Dems, despite having a persuasive manifesto and an aura of purity and sanity about them that Labour lost when Blair took us into Iraq, will make a decent but ultimately meaningless showing.

The country has been turning to the Right for a long time. Maybe since Al Qaeda flew planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Historians will tell you it's inevitable in times of war, especially when the country in question has a brutal imperialist history like our own and believes in its implicit right to be boss of everyone who doesn't resemble its brother; as well as the implicit rightness of everything it does, regardless of how manifestly wrong it might be.

Every other conversation I hear is about getting rid of the blacks and the Muslims, microchipping paedophiles, castrating sex offenders, destroying the self-serving swine in the unions, Gordon Brown working for the Taliban. This is no time for anything except flat-out, down-the-line traditional Conservatism, and everybody knows they're going to get that from David Cameron, whatever his PR people might be telling us now to lure out the wavering five-bedroom liberals who don't want an Arab moving in next door.

But as much as I believe the outcome of the Election is a foregone conclusion, and that almost everything decent and progressive in this country is about to be sold down the river again, I will continue to campaign for the alternative. What else am I going to do in the next four hellish weeks? Sit back and say nothing as my fellow Englishmen ruin my country? I'm too much of a bigmouth for that.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Well said Bruce, that's two of us who won't be supporting the Tories, something I've never done anyway since I became eligible to scrawl my cross on ballot papers back in the glory days of 1958. I've not visited your site for a while, so I was overjoyed to find, on doing so, such an eloquent summary of the dire political situation in today's United (so-called) Kingdom.Keep up the good work.

Thank you Bruce's Dad. Perhaps I got my dislike of those evil devils from you by osmosis. Mum became a Labour supporter and then a Communist but as much as she would probably have liked to deny it once Thatcher had polarised politics forever, she was an admirer of the local Tory candidate Peter Fry when we were kids. Remember the rhyme she used to sing? "Vote, vote, vote for Peter Fry/ Smack old Labour in the eye"? What a journey from that to the Wellingborough Communist Party.